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Why is this only for Ultimate?

Question

While I realise that some aspects of Debugger Canvas are Ultimate-based (use of IntelliTrace), the basic premise is applicable to all VS2010 SKUs. Are there any plans to produce a version for Professional for us mere mortals who don't have £10Ks
to spend on our IDE?Brian Chappell Orca Media UK Ltd

Answers

IntelliTrace isn't the reason we require Ultimate, and if that was the only tie we had with Ultimate then we could have shipped a version that simply doesn't support that feature. The reason we require Ultimate is so that we could re-use the underlying
technology for the Dependency Diagrams to identify and display the right fragments on the canvas. This re-use is what made it possible for us to release an out-of-band power tool in an efficient manner on top of Visual Studio 2010.

It's unlikely that we'll be able to make this version of the power tool available in Pro, but let us know if you'd like to see this kind of user experience built directly "in the box" as part of Visual Studio.

In the mean time, if you don’t have Visual Studio Ultimate then you still have two options to try Debugger Canvas for free:

The second option is probably the most convenient since Visual Studio Ultimate is already pre-installed on the machine. All you need to do is copy the
Debugger Canvas VSIX into the virtual machine and install it.

IntelliTrace isn't the reason we require Ultimate, and if that was the only tie we had with Ultimate then we could have shipped a version that simply doesn't support that feature. The reason we require Ultimate is so that we could re-use the underlying
technology for the Dependency Diagrams to identify and display the right fragments on the canvas. This re-use is what made it possible for us to release an out-of-band power tool in an efficient manner on top of Visual Studio 2010.

It's unlikely that we'll be able to make this version of the power tool available in Pro, but let us know if you'd like to see this kind of user experience built directly "in the box" as part of Visual Studio.

In the mean time, if you don’t have Visual Studio Ultimate then you still have two options to try Debugger Canvas for free:

The second option is probably the most convenient since Visual Studio Ultimate is already pre-installed on the machine. All you need to do is copy the
Debugger Canvas VSIX into the virtual machine and install it.

I completely agree. I realize that they need some killer features available in the high end versions but it's really painful for those of us that are professional developers without $12k laying around. A 21x price gap just seems excessive. I would love
to see a version in between that has the nice debugging features without all the team related features or whatever else brings about the crazy price. I work in a team that rarely exceeds 2 or 3 developers and it's often just me working on a project. That means
I'm totally shut out of having those debugging features just because I don't work for a huge company. Convenient debugging shouldn't be limited to big teams, small development teams have bugs to find too.Steve

This is a really stunning tool. I'm blown away! I have Ultimate, but I really think that this should be a Pro feature. This set the bar for debugging and should be available to all professional developers, not just those with
very deep pockets. Hey - you could always make Ultimate cheaper ;)

IntelliTrace isn't the reason we require Ultimate, and if that was the only tie we had with Ultimate then we could have shipped a version that simply doesn't support that feature. The reason we require Ultimate is so that we could re-use the underlying
technology for the Dependency Diagrams to identify and display the right fragments on the canvas. This re-use is what made it possible for us to release an out-of-band power tool in an efficient manner on top of Visual Studio 2010.

It's unlikely that we'll be able to make this version of the power tool available in Pro, but let us know if you'd like to see this kind of user experience built directly "in the box" as part of Visual Studio.

In the mean time, if you don’t have Visual Studio Ultimate then you still have two options to try Debugger Canvas for free:

The second option is probably the most convenient since Visual Studio Ultimate is already pre-installed on the machine. All you need to do is copy the
Debugger Canvas VSIX into the virtual machine and install it.

I don't understand your question. Are you asking if the Ultimate users want it "in the box" vs as an add-on or if ALL editions have it "in the box"?

Hi Abdu,

I think the first question is currently the most interesting to us. We're really curious to hear if current Ultimate users who have tried the canvas think that this is a valuable feature and a high priority for us to include in the box.

I think that it's a really useful tool. It's not useful ALL the time, and can sometimes get in the way of "regular" debugging where keeping track of where one is isn't a problem, but it definitely is useful.

Great feedback, thanks! It is great to hear about when the tool is useful and not. It sounds like you would like to use Debugger Canvas for some debug sessions but not all.

You may already have found this, but there is a command on the Debug menu called Start Debugging without Debugger Canvas. This will run the normal file based debugger. If you prefer to have that as your default, you can make Debugger Canvas "optional" under
Debug ->Debugger Canvas -> Options and Settings. Then F5 will run the normal debugger, but you will have a dedicated command to debug in the canvas.

I too cannot use this addon due to only having the pro version of VS2010 :(

However, after watching the short video on it's use, it does look like it would be a very valuable tool. I don't usually like giving feedback on something I haven't actually used, but seeing the call stack presented in this way, I'm impressed.

If it's possible, I'd love to see a future version made available for those of us using the less pricey versions of VS.

You're saying that the logic in dependency diagrams is somehow needed for this, but I'm left wondering about similar functionality that's in solution navigator and "go to definition" (since I'm talking about the original code bubbles concept, and not
this debugging add-on alone).

I understand that this has been created as a debugger enhancement, but I remember seeing this initially as a video before it was a potential part of VS and thinking "that would be a really cool alternative to the file-based development setup in the IDE".

I'll gladly check it out in the VM, but I think you're missing a real opportunity to improve Visual Studio by making it only a debugging tool. This makes design, inheritance, dependencies, and code visualization much more accessible while writing code.

Don't be fool by Microsoft marketing materials, IntelliTrace doesn't even support Mixed-mode debugging. I am wondering how many desktop apps are developed by pure C#? We are wasting $10k to upgrade to Ultimate and IntelliTrace is useless just because
our C# apps have some Win32 native calls. IntelliTrace can't bypass those native calls, therefore no .iTrace can be generated.